


Golden Towers

by lantadyme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-31
Updated: 2012-03-31
Packaged: 2017-11-02 19:17:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/372427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lantadyme/pseuds/lantadyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For once, Roxy leads him exactly where he needs to go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Golden Towers

The thunderstorm buffets the apartment like the scream of an angry god, wind so intense it would shatter the windows to sand if he didn't have the high-grade industrial steel shutters up. The whole superstructure twists and sways on the four-pronged struts, girders that go down through hundreds of meters of water to the concrete foundation below. The rain pelts the roof and every wall in a noise that sounds more like hailstones the size of fists than it does anything in a liquid state. The lights are off. He can't stand to watch the power flicker. It spooks him too much. The noise and the rocking of the apartment, the thunder crashing at a sky-rending peak just outside the meager thickness of his walls, everything shaking with the bedrock shake of a giant earthquake. These storms are the worst thing. Dirk is all about plans and points of action and there is nothing he can do to prevent this. He is helpless at the force of nature, an insect in the hand of all of creation, and he sits in bed trying not to imagine the roof peeling off like the lid of a sardine can. 

He's at his most distracted. So of course, it's now that Roxy decides to go AWOL. 

On Derse, a cry goes up from the Dersites, a million voices all sighing together at once. It's not the sound they make when she drifts to the brink of the Veil and disappears in a swirl of black, on her way to dance in the depths of the void, a pirouette in the emptiness, a jeté between spheres of influence of the distant Dark Gods—their princess off again on another of her drunken sleep adventures, the kind of thing a Dersite mother spins into fairytales for her tiny children before she tucks them in at night. This isn't that. This is the sad moan of unbelieving hesitance, a hint of fear and a hint of rage, the kind of thing he imagines was heard at the explosion of the Challenger: a patriotic dream shattered in one shutter-speed snap of an instant.

She's left Derse atmosphere. She's headed for Prospit. 

He stumbles twice trying to get out of bed. The thunderstorm on Earth is so loud it's deafening, the raw power enough to make his skin prickle. On Derse, he stands distracted at the window of his dreamer's room, cold with animal fear and struggling to push that off long enough to get this done. They hate when she leaves for Prospit. For weeks afterward the papers circulate slander and strawman political arguments on whether Prospit has managed to brainwash their princess or not. She's the pride and joy of Derse, but every time she leaves there are more and more shady plots that crop up, plans to shove a knife in her belly and just end it before she turns coat.

That's not happening. 

Dirk slips from his room carefully, sticking to the deep purple shadow and moving through the city in silence. It's hell trying to concentrate. His flying is nearly as drunken as Roxy's is, the thunderstorm shaking his entire apartment and demanding his paranoid attention back on Earth. His toes clip the landing of a balcony and he falls against the shiny purple marble for a long minute, hands like claws gripping his knees as his heart hammers. He hates storms. Hates them. There's nothing he can do to get away from them, trapped in the middle of the ocean with Derse as his only refuge, and when the thunder is so loud his ears ring with that high-pitched silence of hearing damage, there's no way he can concentrate on his dreams. 

On the other side of the moon he zips up the length of the chain, dodging in and out of the massive shadows. Nearly to the axis, he veers at a sheer ninety degree angle and disappears into the black of space—the cloak-and-dagger escape from Derse orbit, perfect and never once witnessed. If only Roxy would take that route instead, but she's drunk and sleepwalking. He's learned not to expect much. 

She's already too far ahead for him to be able to track her through the void. He knows the way to Prospit. He's been to Prospit so many times he has it memorized, and it's not always to wrangle the Rogue of Void. 

He knows where she tends to lurk—in the empty brilliance of the royal ballroom, dancing a waltz by herself with no audience but the White Queen occasionally looking in on her; a speck of purple spinning in a sea of gold. Or she'll be skirting the perimeter of the science centers, peeking in the windows like a gaudy covert spy, her eyes still closed and blind to the wonders within. She's got countless hiding places, but he knows the two she tends toward the most. They're the same as his.

Why else would a Dersite prince or princess come to Prospit? Fuck espionage. He'd rather visit the Maid and the Page.

The thunder pounds and he fades back to Earth for a minute, sweating in the damp chill of the storm. It's not letting up. It's been three hours and it's not even close to dying, an entire ocean of water and hot Texas air to fuel its rampage. He sinks back under his covers and concentrates on dreaming before paradox space automatically relocates his drifting dreamself to his room on Derse, lest it get lost.

He doesn't have to be careful of people seeing him on Prospit. He doesn't have to steal in silently along the shadows and the tangent vector of the connecting chain. He can simply drop down from the heavens toward the golden rooftops and the twin sparkling minarets that stand above it all, the Heroes held up high for the entire moon to behold.

She's in Jane's room when he finds her. Asleep on her feet, Roxy stands in the center of the pink carpeted room, snoring softly and with her cat in her arms. Frigglish is asleep too, purring and the satin of his coat shiny in the bright light of Skaia. Dirk has never seen Roxy bring him out of her room before. He shifts around to face her, watching her sleeping face through his shades. He could take her by the wrists and haul her back to Derse now, tuck her back in bed and stand over her for a while to make sure she stays. That's what he should do. Maybe Derse would give the slander a rest for once if their princess was back in bed by curfew. But the thunderstorm back on Earth rocks the fancy space-age steel pylon superstructure of the apartment, everything dipping with a rocking seasickness; it's a building bought and rebuilt and reinforced hundreds of years ago by his brother to stand far longer than the tests of time. It won't fall. It's been through worse than this storm and so has he. But he's fifteen and alone, curled up in bed with the noise and the awe-striking power around him deafening, Cal's lifeless arms around his neck as the only meager comfort he has in that cold harsh reality. He wouldn't admit it to anyone, but he's scared. Very scared. And for a moment he wishes he could sink down at the foot of Jane's pink bed and last the storm out here.

Roxy snaps him out of the fantasy when she shoves Frigglish into his arms. He nearly drops the cat to the floor, a lump of warm soft fur. Roxy walks to the side of Jane's bed with a silly smile on her face and peels back the pink blankets that are tucked up to her chin. It almost looks like she's going to climb into bed next to Jane, but then she moves like only a drunken sleepwalker can and slips her arms around Jane's waist to heave her off the side of the mattress. Both girls go down into a pile of yellow and purple cloth, Jane's knees and head hitting the carpet with a dull thump.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asks the thin air, fighting down the urge to shake Roxy awake. He sets the cat down on the floor and hooks his hands under Jane's armpits, lifting her carefully off of Roxy's giggling body as she squirms to free herself. Jane is completely limp, none of the semi-awareness and muscle understanding Dirk has dealt with when picking up Roxy before. Roxy gets free and scoops up her cat again, sitting light as a bird on the windowsill and kicking her legs. 

Right. He needs to grab her and get her back to Derse before she does something else stupid, but first he has to get Jane back in bed. She's shorter than Roxy, heavier than Roxy, but she fits in his arms like she was made to be there, her head lolling gently against his chest as he picks her up like every Prince in every shitty fairy tale. Her hair is scrunched up from sleep and her face is clean, all of her quiet and calm and happy in a way that fascinates and confounds him every time he looks at her. He's never looked like that. He's never felt that way. He envies her for that more than anything else. 

On Earth, something solid strikes the side of the apartment with a crack like a gunshot, the whole superstructure shaking. The winds are beyond gale-force. All of nature threatens to tear him to shreds, and on Prospit he holds Jane in his arms, hugging her close to him with his heart beating fast and scared, not wanting to let go of the quiet comfort of having her right here. 

"C'mon," Roxy murmurs in her sleep, floating from the windowsill and gripping the hem of Jane's dress. She pulls back toward the window again, Frigglish cradled to her chest. She wants to fly on to some stupid new adventure in the back of her dreaming mind, and apparently she's bringing everyone along with her today. The cat. Him. Jane. She tugs at the dress, her grip firm and not letting go, and Dirk takes one step over the pink carpet, two, hoping the game will get old and she'll give up before he has to pry her fingers one by one from the pretty yellow fabric. 

His toes brush the wall, Roxy out the window and still pulling. "Stop," Dirk tells her, the word firm. 

She hangs there limp and sleepy and not listening in the slightest, and then she shrugs and drops Jane's dress. "Sleepover," she says back, slurring everything but emphasizing it with a strict wave of her hand like that should mean everything. She reaches out and touches his shoulder fondly. And then she takes off in an instant—directly for Jake's tower. 

It's going to be the same thing there. She's going to haul him out of bed too. And Dirk stands at the window, eyes closed for a long long moment as all he can hear is the pounding roar of the rain in his ears. The thunder shakes the bed. Jane's weight in his arms leads him to a center point. A calm in the midst of it all. The apartment twists again and he hugs her closer. Sleepover. God, that sounds fantastic right now.

It's not the sane thing to do, but he eases Jane gently through the window and floats there above everything, Prospit stretching out forever in an angular gold display under his feet. Jake's room is all blue to Jane's pink, and Dirk is a little surprised to find Roxy not dragging him off the mattress onto the floor. Instead she's sitting on the bed with him, her back to the blue paisley wallpaper and her legs folded gently over his sleeping form. She pets Frigglish absently, her head leaned back against the wall, lolling to the side like a sleeping girl's should. She looks comfortable. Ready to stay. Dirk floats just inside the window with Jane in his arms, weighing out the ounces of his will and rationality to see if they can conquer the scared child's paranoia that's gripping him right now.

The human side of him wins. He just wants to sit with his friends through the apocalyptic shaking of his apartment, the wind loud like a jetcruiser and destruction so so close. Leave the perfect right logical machine decisions for when the storm is over and he has to pick bits of seaweed from the cracks in the roof and patch up the plaster around the craters left in the walls by hurled fish and crustaceans. Fix Derse politics. Tuck Jane back into bed. Later.

He settles down on the bed next to Roxy. Jake's back is warm through the blankets as he rests the backs of his knees against him. Jane's head slips down against Roxy's shoulder, her legs sprawled out. And back on Earth the bed is still shaking, but right now, on Prospit with the three people he trusts most in all the world, Dirk breathes and feels the first hint of calm he's felt in the past three hours.


End file.
